Ty Cobb Quotes

Few names have left a firmer imprint upon the pages of the history of American times than has that of Ty Cobb... he seems to have understood that in the competition of baseball, just as in war, defensive strategy never has produced ultimate victory.

I used to think Romeo and Juliet was the greatest love story ever written. But now that I’m middle-aged, I know better. Oh, Romeo certainly thinks he loves his Juliet. Driven by hormones, he unquestionably lusts for her. But if he loves her, it’s a shallow love. You want proof?” Cagney didn’t wait for Dr. Victor to say yay or nay. “Soon after meeting her for the first time, he realizes he forgot to ask her for her name. Can true love be founded upon such shallow acquaintance? I don’t think so. And at the end, when he thinks she’s dead, he finds no comfort in living out the remainder of his life within the paradigm of his love, at least keeping alive the memory of what they had briefly shared, even if it was no more than illusion, or more accurately, hormonal. “Those of us watching events unfold from the darkness know she merely lies in slumber. But does he seek the reason for her life-like appearance? No. Instead he accuses Death of amorousness, convinced that the ‘lean abhorred monster’ endeavors to keep Juliet in her present state, her cheeks flushed, so that she might cater to his own dissolute desires. But does Romeo hold her in his arms one last time and feel the warmth of her blood still coursing through her veins? Does he pinch her to see if she might awaken? Hold a mirror to her nose to see if her breath fogs it? Once, twice, three times a ‘no.’” Cagney sighed, listened to the leather creak as he shifted his weight in his chair. “No,” he repeated. “His alleged love is so superficial and selfish that he seeks to escape the pain of loss by taking his own life. That’s not love, but obsessive infatuation. Had they wed—Juliet bearing many children, bonding, growing together, the masks of the star-struck teens they once were long ago cast away, basking in the comforting campfire of a love born of a lifetime together, not devoured by the raging forest fire of youth that consumes everything and leaves behind nothing—and she died of natural causes, would Romeo have been so moved to take his own life, or would he have grieved properly, for her loss and not just his own?

Everybody loves to hate a sinner; reading stories about them makes people feel better about themselves.

When I began playing the game, baseball was as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch.

If you're wondering what's wrong with Fenway Park in the first place, you're not the only one. Fenway is special precisely because it has what modern stadiums lack: seats that, while often cramped, offer the best views in baseball; and the sense that, if you squint, that could be Smoky Joe Wood pitching to Ty Cobb out there instead of Jeff Fassero and Bobby Higginson.

I've got to be first all the time — in everything.

I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me… but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.

Germany Schaefer, trying to send a subtle hint to umpire Billy Evans that the game ought to be called, appeared at second base wearing a yellow rain slicker,

The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it - Ty Cobb

The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it - Ty Cobb

Each note Cobb wrote contained a rave review of his abilities over a fictitious signature. “Ty Cobb is really tearing up the horsehide in the Tennessee-Alabama League—Jack Smith.” Instead of sending off these pieces right away, Ty would drop them in mailboxes at various points along the Steelers’ circuit, the better to create the impression of a grassroots movement.

The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it. - Ty Cobb

Cobb’s well-deserved reputation as a bibliophile (he couldn’t resist biographies of Napoleon) sometimes resulted in him receiving books instead of trophies or flowers.

Deep into the evening, some Tigers gave brief, funny talks and the entire assemblage joined in a rendition of “Michigan, My Michigan.

The entry of a hero on the public scene goes unnoticed,” the great A. J. Liebling wrote in The Earl of Louisiana, “but his rentrée always has an eager press.

(Of the five Cobb children, Shirley, who ran a bookstore for many years in Palo Alto, was the most similar to her father, which may explain her particularly harsh assessments of him.)

Schalk, a catcher for the White Sox for seventeen years, no doubt got more than a few chances to use his favorite line about Cobb: “When Ty started to steal second, I would throw to third.

(the veteran catcher Moe Berg, a New Yorker who graduated from Princeton and Columbia Law school and was a frequent houseguest of Cobb’s in Augusta, would call him “an intellectual giant”).

The umpire ruled that the catcher didn’t touch Cobb. He also ruled that Cobb hadn’t touched the plate. While the Yankee players were protesting, Cobb sneaked around the bunch and touched the plate.

As the first baseman posed these well-crafted queries, Collins went looking for a policeman to arrest Cobb for “striking him while he was wearing eyeglasses,” then considered an especially heinous offense.

Cobb was “jabbering all over the place” and practically hornpiping with glee. “What will the Babe say about this trick by Ty, five in two games?” (The feat has been equaled by several players since but has never been surpassed.)

Navin, who never had children, felt close to Cobb from the day he met him, a nervous, travel-worn C-leaguer who had just lost his father under appalling circumstances. The two would excoriate (and extol) each other over the years as only a father figure and son-substitute could.

their genial and generous host, who served the MacDonalds breakfast in bed. When MacDonald took a rare first edition of a Confederate military history down from a shelf in the cabin, Cobb noticed his interest, and insisted that he keep the book. When the three went to a restaurant,

Dinneen was a sort of Neville Chamberlain figure. Earlier in the game he had been slugged in the stomach and jaw by Donie Bush following a disputed call but he did not eject the Tigers shortstop until, when the inning ended, Bush tried to hit him with a thrown ball. All eyes remained on Cobb and the Babe,

At the same time, he studiously avoided becoming a textbook player. He wanted to blend the best of the received wisdom into a refined version of his crazy-seeming “harum scarum” style. He wanted to play a slightly different game than everyone else was playing, to be out of sync with the anticipated rhythms, protocols, and conventions.

(Cobb brought as his guest Tigers third baseman George Moriarity, who during the 1935 World Series as an umpire would distinguish himself by stalking over to the Chicago Cubs dugout and threatening to eject the entire team after some players had made anti-Semitic remarks to Tigers star Hank Greenberg.) The next day Cobb broke his rule about

Besides having baseball and success in common they also had Claire Merritt Hodgson, a Georgia native and a Ziegfeld Follies girl who was Ruth’s second wife. In her autobiography, The Babe and I, Mrs. Ruth said she had known Cobb “very well” as a teenager back in Athens, before he married Charlie, and for what it may be worth, Al Stump, in his second book on Cobb, suggests they were young lovers.

Loomis, the longest-tenured Time, Inc., employee, still worked at the magazine while I was researching this book, and when I asked her about Cobb, with whom she’d also gone on a second date to an old-timers game at Yankee Stadium, she directed me toward a memoir she’d written in which she described him as “smart and gentlemanly.” He’d been deeply impressed, she said, with her knowledge of baseball.

The president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, Charles William Eliot, thought that ball-carriers in football ought not search for holes in the line that could lead to gaudy breakaway runs, but should do the modest, gentlemanly thing and plow headfirst into the nearest man-pile. (Eliot also didn’t like baseball because he believed curveballs and other deceptive pitches to be unsportsmanlike.)

Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby—who had a much worse reputation than Cobb for being an SOB—once wrote a magazine article called “You’ve Got to Cheat to Win” in which he contended that cheating occurred in each of 2,259 major league games in which he participated, starting in 1915. (He wasn’t even talking about the use of spitballs, which were legal until 1920.) Diving into a pitched ball was perhaps the most common illicit practice;

One day in the spring of 1894 or so, Amanda Cobb looked out her kitchen window and saw Tyrus and a bunch of Negro boys merrily hauling a cart laden with scrap metal, broken furniture, and other things they’d found in backyards and vacant lots around town. They were headed toward the junkyard to try to make a few dollars, and Mrs. Cobb knew for what. “He was always thinking up ways of earning money to buy baseball supplies,” she would tell a writer for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Sunday Union and Republican in 1928. “He was always playing when he was a child. In fact, we had a hard time getting him to go to school. I remember that the first money he earned he spent for a mitt. He couldn’t have been more than six years old when a neighbor asked him to take his cow to the pasture and gave Ty some change for doing it. Ty didn’t buy candy or ice cream. He knew what he wanted, and he got it—a baseball glove.

Cobb’s perfectly timed base running turned a tap-back to the box into an inside-the-park home run. Davy Jones had been on third, and when Cobb made contact Jones unwisely got caught in a rundown while Cobb flew around the bases at top speed. The second Jones was tagged out by catcher Steve O’Neill, “a foot from third,” said ex-umpire (and ex-Tiger) Babe Pinelli, who dined out on the story for years, Cobb passed him, kept on going for home—and, without sliding, scored the game-winning run, first baseman Doc Johnston being “too awed by what he was witnessing,” said Pinelli, to cover home plate, as the textbook suggests.

Mention in baseball’s official record books, however, requires that catchers play a minimum of 156 games in a season,

A complicated fellow, he was said to have a crippling aversion to the song “Sweet Adeline,” which when hummed by his opponents in a way that mimicked a trombone, the historian Fred Lieb tells us, caused him to come apart emotionally, the way Rube Waddell did when you showed him a puppy.

and, serving up the spicy synonyms like a Bennett Park wiener vendor, noted that “swats, bingles and wallops are as common in the jungaleers camp as dandelions in a shiftless neighbor’s front lawn.

The photo was never published, or even developed, it seems. No one knows why, but I suspect that the camera, rather than staying a camera, ended its life as a hat.